[DjangoReinhardt]

Well, I have been trying a hobby-dev project that is kinda along these lines but I am almost on the verge of giving up.

The problem is, the feed/stream API endpoints for most of the services mentioned above, either do not exist or have been removed.

- FB and Instagram no longer provide them, for sure.

- WhatsApp doesn't have an official API - the last time I test-drove Yowsup, my number was 'blocked' by WhatsApp.

- No idea if there's an API for iMessage, although I get the feeling there mightn't be...

Screen-scraping all of these services is way too much effort for way little reward. Not to mention that FB keeps 'updating' its UI/UX quite frequently and Instagram doesn't show a 'feed' on the web if you login.

- FB messenger is based off the XMPP protocol, so yeah, there might be a way to access it without having to screen-scrape.

- There's a free/paid service called Integrated Inbox which integrates Google's services: http://integratedinbox.com/plans/

That leaves HN, reddit and the Google gang - is it really worth the time to integrate these into one service? Maybe one could build the basic structure over the weekend and then provide an option add-on different sites as a 'plugin'...

[modeless]

Well yeah, screen scraping would be required. The core of the product would have to be a screen scraping engine that makes it easy to build screen scrapers fast. You'd also have to commit to daily updates of all the various screen scrapers to keep them working. Without that it would fail.

Perhaps a machine learning approach could work.

[Senji]

You could be a little bit more adversarial in the approach. Create several accounts, have them each message one another. Since you know the message and can use OCR, you can easily automate compensation for changes in the UI.